“The Li'l Depressed Boy is about a stuffed ragdoll who falls in love with a punk rock girl.” Artist Sina Grace’s explanation of his and writer S. Steven Struble’s Image book seems to be enough to get its hooks into potential readers, drawing enough interest to sell out its first issue back in February.

Kurtis Wiebe and Riley Rossmo's new 5-issue horror mystery miniseries from Image, Green Wake shares its tone and intent with such venerable mind bending thrillers as Dark City and, as Wiebe and Rossmo are happy to admit, Twin Peaks and Lost. Released earlier this month, the series bring together the twin hooks of amnesia and murder to a small community where inhabitants awake with no memory of how they got there and no obvious connection to one another, nor any obvious point of escape.

MTV Geek caught up with "TRON" and "TRON: Legacy" actor Bruce Boxleitner at Emerald City Comicon, and he gave us the inside track on the upcoming animated series "TRON: Uprising," telling us, "It's somewhere in the TRON world just before where TRON: Legacy's movie takes place." Boxleitner will be playing the same character as in the first movie:

"I probably have a leg up on everybody else, as Elijah (Wood) and Lance (Henriksen) are coming in with new characters, and I'm playing the part of the wearier older Tron."

Boxleitner also said that the reactions of the fans to the TRON teaser at San Diego Comic Con helped greenlight the movie's sequel. Get the full scoop with the videos below!

MTV Geek caught up with "Twenty-Seven" writer Charles Soule at Emerald City Comicon, and he chatted with us about "The Curse of 27," how the comic is set up like a concert, and guitar chord Easter Eggs:

"I thought it would be neat to put these little things hidden in the book, on pages that are related to the number 9...so on pages that are multiples of 9 there are guitar symbols hidden within the page gutters, and those symbols can be turned into a code. The first person to solve that code, I'll do something nice for."

Soule also discussed how they designed the covers for Twenty-Seven, each cover based on a different musician, such as Kurt Cobain, blues musician Robert Johnson, and Jimi Hendrix -- and, exclusively to MTV Geek, about cool new round of covers for the "second set" of "Twenty-Seven" that will focus on One-Hit-Wonders! Check out the clips below to get all the scoop!

MTV Geek caught up with Chris Roberson at Emerald City Comicon last weekend and the comic book writer was so kind to chat with us about Superman, iZombie, his upcoming Elric story, Stan Lee, and a whole lot more!

I wasn’t really surprised at how at how empty Hall 4C1-2 was at ECCC, but I was disappointed. A guy—an older black dude—sat down in front of me and my friend Jason and asked what this panel was about. We explained it was for Dwayne McDuffie, but that just resulted in a blank look. Jason explained that McDuffie worked on JLA and the JLU cartoon, and that he’d co-founded the Milestone imprint at DC. Somewhere a light went on in the guy’s head, causing him to nod and say, “Yeah, yeah, I heard he died.”

The thing is, I really couldn’t claim to be any more knowledgeable than that old dude who was obviously just looking for a place to chill in the middle of the Con. Ask me to rattle off a chunk of McDuffie’s work and I can go to the aforementioned JLA/JLU, the Milestone stuff, and his run on Fantastic Four—which I only knew about because I happened to be reading the run at the time post-Civil War and really dug what he was doing there. But here I was, sitting in a mostly-empty room, with some of the writer/editor’s friends and colleagues onstage to eulogize a man who’d died two weeks before.

If you wandered into the room you’d have seen Mark Waid up on stage leading the proceedings with Bob Harras and Marv Wolfman seated beside him. At the far end of the table was a younger guy named David Walker, who’d been a friend of McDuffie for 15 years, hoping to give the guy who’d been his mentor a proper sendoff. The whole thing was pretty mellow. I don’t think I was expecting to start crying or anything—in the grand scheme of things, two weeks is a long time relatively speaking and folks had move onto to other things in the Facebook/Twitter/blogosphere.

Waid set the tone for the remembrances in saying that McDuffie “pushed the boundaries and helped others push the boundaries of comics beyond pasty white guys.” Harras said that McDuffie’s biggest legacy while both he and Harras were assistant editors at Marvel was that he showed “a bunch of liberal white New Yorkers” who were pretty satisfied with the level of diversity in comics that they could do more. I actually really liked that bit. I loved the story Harras told of how McDuffie sent a survey around the Marvel offices asking how many of their black characters did not dress like a chicken.

A simple question and a funny story that kind of exposed the sort of weird default a writer could go into when writing about another race.

But then, according to Waid, McDuffie had what he called an insane curiosity about how things worked. Dude majored in physics and it was important to him, even in his superhero fiction, to have a plausible explanation for how things ticked. I have to imagine that when you take a step back, that mind was working overtime to understand what factors + what circumstances = black superheroes being associated with skateboards back in the late 80’s and early 90’s. What was that process and why was it okay? Read More...

Yesterday we profiled artist Guy Davis on his exit from his long-running stint on B.P.R.D. . Today, we’re catching up with the series’ new artist, Tyler Crook, who’ll be joining Mike Mignola and John Arcudi on the upcoming Monsters arc. Check out what Crook had to say about his early career, how he got drawn into the B.P.R.D. universe, and what’s next for him.

Geek: Who is this Tyler Crook character and what’s he been doing up until now?

Tyler Crook: Mostly I've been making video games. I've done some other art and design work – kids clothing, yellow page ads, website design – but the bulk of my career has been as a 3D modeler in the video games industry. For the last two years I've been working on an original graphic novel with my buddy, Phil Gelatt called Petrograd. It's historical fiction about the assassination of Rasputin. I had always had the comic bug and wanted to get into it and after working on Petrograd I knew I had to make comics my full-time job. Read More...

Whew, we’re finally in the home stretch here, people, with our coverage of ECCC. This time, we’re looking at the BOOM! Studios panel, which was moderated by Marketing Director Chip Mosher, who was joined by company founder Ross Richie and Editor-in-Chief Matt Gagnon.

There weren’t a whole lot of new announcements—some projects, like Roger Langridge’s Snarked and the upcoming Peanuts OGN had been talked up a couple of weeks back. Really, the major announcement was that the BOOM! Kids line was being rebranded as Kaboom! given market research showing that young readers tended to reject properties with the “kids” label. Peanuts would be the first entry in the line, and getting an extra dose of significance for being the first time Schultz’s work has been displayed in the OGN format.

The Muppet Show writer Roger Langridge was no longer on that title –and seriously, folks, this is kind of a bummer—but he would be creating a new series called Snarked! which Mosher and the rest of the panel was unwilling to discuss in any detail. No description, no page count, no dates, nada. Read More...

It had to come as a shock to fans of the long-running Hellboyspinoff B.P.R.D. that Guy Davis, the longtime artist for the series would be departing at the conclusion of the current "Gods" storyline. It was such an unlikely end to a pairing that brought the artist and series writers Mike Mignola and John Arcudi to the brink of the end of the world in recent months. Davis is taking a break to focus on his own creator-owned project, The Marquis which is being published through Dark Horse as well as another project he's unable to talk about. No, it wasn't some kind of acrimonious split: "As much as I loved working on the main B.P.R.D. book with Mike and John, it was a hectic monthly grind and I realized I just didn’t have enough time for all the projects I wanted to do."

Not to get all cliched, all good things must come to an end, right?

As unexpectedly and quietly as the collaboration ended, its beginning was actually pretty gradual. Prior to joining B.P.R.D., the artist had done work for Vertigo and Caliber and had his own indie project, The Marquiswhich he originally published through Oni. Davis credits a simple meeting with Mignola "at some random con" where they were both guests as the first meeting between the two talents, and from there the duo struck up a friendship.

I would call to talk monsters and catch up and he would always ask what I was working on~ which usually was something work-for-hire that didn’t involve monsters. He would say he never understood how after seeing me doing the stuff I wanted to draw on my own series, The Marquis that other companies wouldn’t hire me for monster/horror type books. I didn’t know why either, but when he mentioned he was thinking of spinning off B.P.R.D. from Hellboy into its own series I jumped at the chance to work with him on it!

If there was one panel that wasn’t about to hold back the announcements, it was Oni Press and the raft of 2011 titles on display during their presentation. Joining Director of Sales and Cory Casoni onstage were writer Greg Rucka (Stumptown, Queen and Country), artists Steve Rolston (Ghost Projekt), Brian Hurtt (The Sixth Gun), Ray Fawkes (Posessions), Sarah Oleksyk (Ivy), and color artist Bill Crabtree (Invincible, The Sixth Gun).

Casoni kicked off the presentation with the announcement that lawyer by day, nerd rapper by night Eugene WarRock has a free Oni Press Mixtape available for download on his site.

Next up, he showed a slide with the cover of the collected edition of Joe Harris and Steve Rolston’s supernatural weapons of mass destruction story, Ghost Projekt, which just hit shelves last week sporting a glow-in-the-dark cover. Rolston talked about using his clean, almost cartoony style to catch readers off-guard just before the story becomes really and truly gruesome. Casoni and Rolston also credited colorist Dean Trippe for his work on the book in realizing the muted tones of post-Soviet Russia.

After that, the discussion moved on to Sarah Oleksyk’s Ivy, a slice-of-life drama about the titular teen who tries escaping from her problems, only to realize most of them are in her own head. Interesting fact: Ivy was actually a Russ Manning-nominated webcomic before getting the print treatment.

So before getting to any of the other announcements from the Dark Horse Panel, the big news which came towards the end was that Guy Davis, the longtime artist and collaborator with Mike Mignola and John Arcudi on B.P.R.D. is leaving the book, with the free ECCC-exclusive B.P.R.D.: Hell on Earth story being the last work by the artist for the series. Series editor Scott Allie says that it’s hard to overestimate Davis’ impact on the look and feel of the book—he and Mignola visually defined the look and feel of the universe, with Davis getting extra credit for lending a sense of animation and subtle refinement to characters like team leader Abe Sapien and the spectral Johannes.

You have to hand it to Marvel: they sure have a handle on the theatrical aspects of a panel. With a lineup of Jeff Parker, Brian Michael Bendis, Paul Tobin, and Senior VP of Creator and Content Development, C.B. Cebulski, the panel started off with Cebulski announcing that they publisher would be changing its process of hiring new writers, starting at the panel, with a lottery for an exclusive contract. After offering a coupon for a contract to the first person who raised their hand, Cebulski called Nick Spencer up to the stage to accept the little green slip of paper.

The Marvel panel had only one purpose: to drop the mega-sized bomb that Nick Spencer—writer and creator of runaway hits Morning Glories and Infinite Vacation—was now a Marvel exclusive writer. Spencer will be continuing his work on Iron Man 2.0 with series artist Barry Kitson, and working on Secret Avengers during this summer’s Fear Itself event. Spencer couldn’t contain his excitement: “This is a huge honor for me, something I’ve been dreaming about since I was a kid.”

For those of you out there who enjoy his non-Marvel titles, don’t fret: the new contract allows Spencer to continue his work on his creator-owned projects as well as work on DC’s T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents.

Beyond that the panel was mostly a Q&A with very little in the way of major announcements. Bendis did say that this will be the biggest year for the Ultimate line of books with the recent “Death of Spider-Man” arc kicking off a series of changes for the imprint. Also, when I pressed the writers on-stage about some characters readers should watch out for in 2011, Tobin said we should look out for M.O.D.O.K. (those periods have to get boring to type); Parker gave a shout-out to the Red Hulk (Incredible Hulks, Secret Avengers); Cebulski thinks people should keep an eye on Dani Moonstar New Mutants; and finally, Bendis said we should watch Red Skull (Fear Itself), Moon Knight, and of course, Thor.

We’ll also get a return of the 50-State Initiative in the pages of the upcoming Fear Itself: Youth In Revolt.

The crew at the Top Cow panel was pretty eager about the slate of titles coming down the pipe in 2011. Representing the line were writers Ron Marz (Artifacts, Witchblade) and Joshua Hale Fialkov (Echoes), along with artists Nelson Blake II (Magdalena), Jeremy Haun (Artifacts), Tony Shasteen (Netherworld), John Tyler Christopher (Artifacts).

There was actually quite a bit of time spent on Artifacts, with several covers by artist John Tyler Christopher being shown during the presentation. Of the supernatural action series, Marz says that the work through issue 5 by interior artist Whilce Portacio is “some of his best since his days on X-Men.” An upcoming arc starting with issue 9 will be drawn by Jeremy Haun, with the decision to use a different artist reflecting an attempt to give arc a different personality. The artist was actually given the daunting note in the script to his first issue to “create a new universe.”

I don’t know about the other attendees, but for my money, the most interesting revelation at the Vertigo panel was that the DC Imprint’s Editor-in-Chief, Will Dennis refers to artist Sean Gordon Murphy (Joe the Barbarian) as the “honeybadger of comics.” Oh, yeah, and Murphy will be providing covers and art for this summer’s WWII-set mini, American Vampire: Survival of the Fittest, where all hell breaks loose when a group of Romanian scientists attempt to find a “cure” for vampirism.

Also on hand at the panel were writers Chris Roberson (iZombie, Cinderella), Matt Sturges (Jack of Fables, House of Mystery), Jeff Lemire (Sweet Tooth), and artist Chrissie Zullo (Cinderella: Fables are Forever, Madame Xanadu) to talk about the slate of upcoming titles from Vertigo. There weren’t a lot of new titles announced but there were some interesting developments coming for existing titles.

Avatar’s Director of Sales, Keith Davidsen will be the first to cop to the extreme nature of the company’s output. He says that they get a lot of flack for the sex and violence in titles like Garth Ennis’s Crossed, or their Night of the Living Dead by Mike Wolfer, or Warren Ellis’sBlack Summer. No sweat, Davidsen seems to say—for the mass audiences there’s always Anna Mercury or Ignition City but the extreme content appears to be the company’s bread and butter.

Davidsen had Wolfer on hand to talk about some upcoming titles from Avatar whose booth will be celebrating zombies this year (and they have resident zed-word expert Max Brooks on hand if you don’t believe it).

In that same vein, Wolfer talked a bit about a couple of upcoming Night of the Living Dead miniseries including Death Valley and the 2011 Annual. As with all of Avatar’s NotLD titles, this takes place on the same night of George Romero’s classic film, tracing the impact of the zombie virus as it crosses the country. Whereas the film explored sociopolitical tensions in the Northeast, Death Valley will look at the late 60’s, post hippie, Manson-edged era, with Wolfer promising that his story will touch upon the laid-back Southern California lifestyle under assault by the living dead. He wouldn’t go into too much detail about the Annual, save to say that it was set in Louisiana and would likely be seen as controversial. My guess is that they’ll be playing up the racial component of the time and place.

Also: did you know that Avatar has a sister company called Boundless? Well, apparently they do and Boundless is in the business of releasing Lady Death comics. Brian Pulido’s sun-deprived anti-heroine has an ongoing series through Boundless, with scripts co-written by Wolfer and Pulido, with art by Marcelo Mueller. Wolfer boasted that the first eighteen issues of the series are written with major changes for the character coming in issue six this year. For real fans of Lady Death though, there’s a 500 page Art of Lady Death hardcover coming this May, with pieces by Avatar regulars like Juan Jose Ryp, Matt Martin, and Richard Ortiz. Oh yeah, and it’s going to be signed by series creator Brian Pulido.